Joint Operations: Typhoon Rising

Review
by Tom McNamara

Novalogic has always been known for its military games. While Comanche has been, arguably, the most popular franchise, the Delta Force series has been going strong for almost six years now, recently morphing into the Black Hawk Down license and combining the Comanche flight engine. In theory, it's the best of both worlds, but multiplayer proved to be the big appeal, as single player suffered from poor AI and some frustrating design decisions. Large maps, constant action, and objective-based gameplay with dozens of other gun-toters was pretty nice. Yet even multiplayer had one niggle: no controllable vehicles. This was supposed to debut in the expansion pack, Team Sabre, but was pulled late in development, causing many to wonder when Nova would eventually implement the feature in one of their games. Well, that day has finally come, and this time the action is totally multiplayer, aside from the requisite offline training missions.

Joint Ops brings us to a near-future Indonesia, but the story and locale aren't too important in an MP design to devote much more than, "This is a Southeast Asian tropical environment." You'll get jungles, semi-urban environments, island chains, and fortress assaults, for the most part, on huge maps that support up to 150 people. No, that's not a typo. One hundred and fifty people can play at once on the same map, and the map size and overall stability was solid across the board, although I would have wished for more transport vehicles.

When you have up to 75 people playing on one side, you're going to want to have a sizeable fleet of gunboats, hovercrafts, choppers, APCs, jeeps, buggies, rafts to get people from Point A to Point B, especially when you're traveling long distances over water--the kind of distance that is just not practical to swim. There will be beachhead spawn points you can capture, but you have to, well, capture them (and hold on to them) to avoid making the long trek. And because the damage modeling is so realistic, it's not uncommon to get all the way over there, crawl around for a few seconds, get shot, and start over back at your base. It's also quite easy to defend a beachhead, with a couple gunboats armed with grenade launchers and .50 cals, a few gun emplacements on the beach, and a few snipers and heavy gunners hiding on the ridges and at the edge of the treeline.

Still, this doesn't stop players from trickling in along the flanks, but the most they do is harass the spawn point with small-arms fire and the occasional mortar. A few times I took the job of crawling around in the bush with a sniper rifle and picking these guys off. The enemy will come in with choppers, but the pilot typically simply could not find a good place to land it. This is not a fault of the game, granted, but I flew directly over hot zones several times, and other pilots took a suicidally long time to land. It would have been great to rappel out instead of having to wait until the chopper was close enough for you to jump. And then there's the Stinger missiles, which typically blow up the chopper in one hit. So air approaches are fast but treacherous, and water approaches are similarly challenging because the defender can see you from so far out and peck you to death with emplaced guns, which have infinite ammo.

The maps that stick to ground advancement and combat are much stronger and give Joint Ops a chance to shine. A great gameplay enhancement here is a fast day-night cycle that requires you to use night vision when things get dark. This limits your field of view, but improves stealth immensely. There's still some fairly bright moonlight, but if you keep your head down, you can go a long way to the objective without any hairiness.

The HUD and map design is well done, and should be familiar to those who've played Black Hawk Down. You'll get the compass map in the lower left-hand corner with arrows leading from your spot to the objective. There will be perimeter rings around bases and King of the Hill strategic points, and the game does a good job of keeping people oriented. In the first-person view, spawn points will show up as unobtrusive colored icons, red for rebels and blue for the Joint Ops team. When a point is under attack, the icon's frame will flash yellow. You'll get notifications that a target has been designated for mortar attack, and there's a host of voice macros that allow each side to communicate quickly and effectively. Needing a ride, needing backup, offering a ride, requesting a medic, spotting a sniper, needing a spotter, et cetera, it can all be said with a few keystrokes, and the voice can even be customized to several nationalities and both genders.

Speaking of nationalities, you'll get the full, official outfits for Delta Force, SEALs, Green Berets, British SAS, French GIGN, German KSK, Spetsnaz, Australian SASR, and three Indonesian factions. Clothing textures are almost photorealistically sharp at close range, so the names aren't just there for show--and textures for the whole game are, overall, impressive, especially if you have the horsepower to enable the in-game anisotropic filtering. Once you've chosen your look, you can choose, in most game modes, which class you want to play, which includes Rifleman, Gunner, Engineer, Sniper and Medic. Each one plays a handy role. The rifleman is the standard issue grunt, the engineer has the mortar and Stinger launcher, the medic can heal you or bring you back to life, and the sniper is, well, the guy who typically camps from hundreds of yards away and pecks the spawn camp to death. Character animations are nicely done, and you can also dive into prone by pressing the middle mouse button, which comes in handy with those pot shotter players.

I wouldn't take issue with the ballistics so much, since it's just a game, really--save for the fact that they are explicitly advertised as "sophisticated." Take it from me, though, once you're lying prone with a good view, you can become a veritable death dealer once you get the hang of properly leading your target, anticipating approach, and arcing a little for those long-distance shots. The recoil on a .50 caliber sniper rifle should be considerable enough to make it so I can't plink the target until the clip is empty. And, when prone, scope drift is nearly non-existent. Without wind shear as part of the equation, it's mainly a matter of lifting the sight a few centimeters when you want to get a stationary target that's really far out.

You have muzzle flash and tracers to give away your position, but in this tropical environment, it's typical to be spotted by no more than two people. Make your one-shot kill, climb down from the ridge, and re-position a little farther to the east or west. The guy who didn't die will probably get waxed on his way to you anyway, if he even chooses to risk crossing enemy territory to hunt down a single guy instead of going to the objective. The only way to effectively approach me is to flank from way far out, making the whole sniper-killing enterprise impractical and frustrating. Better to just get in the thick of it before you--oops, killed by another sniper.

Unfortunately, there is a cycle to play which often involves staring at your respawn timer more than actually playing, and by "playing," I mean actively engaging the enemy, not just crawling around or running to where the fight actually is. You can respawn instantly by pressing the Space bar, but that puts you way back at your headquarters. Instead, you're going to want to wait, and sometimes it's only a few seconds. Other times…it's very, very long--and I couldn't figure out what system the game was using to determine how long it should take. It didn't seem to depend on how many times I'd died, or how often I'd died, or how many kills I'd gotten in between deaths. I had to wait 45 seconds to respawn at one point. In the grand scheme of things, 45 seconds is nothing, but on other timers, I could have spawned (and died again) dozens of times within that same time frame. I could have played instead of waited.

What is it that causes such frequent death? It's a combination of things. One is the brutal damage modeling. Sure, it might take only two or three rounds from an M4 to kill someone, but should I die if all three of those went through my foot? Two is the lack of wind shear and generous lack of scope drift, which means people peppering you with fully automatic assault rifle fire when they barely show up even with your sniper scope maxed at 16x zoom. All you see is a flurry of tracers, then you're dead. Third is that there's nothing particularly enticing about being a medic, aside from the warm, fuzzy feeling you get from brining people back from the dead. You can't heal yourself, or spread disease like in, say, Team Fortress Classic. While neither of these would make strict sense in the realism-oriented Joint Ops, neither do the significant benefits the ballistics model gives to snipers. The medic has an M4 but can't even use the 203 variant with its grenade launcher.

The last-but-not-least element that keeps the game from breaking through to something consistently fun is, ironically, the way vehicles are set up. In addition to having no tanks or planes, only the attack chopper lets you operate the vehicle and shoot things at the same time. Everything else is like driving an extremely death-prone bus. And the Stinger and AT4 launchers are so powerful that the passenger vehicles become killboxes if you dare stay inside for more than a minute.

In addition to deathmatch, team deathmatch, king of the hill, and assault modes, there is co-op--but it has some bugs, most notably one that doesn't update your waypoints, which makes the mission impossible to complete, as the objective might not update. We're told the bugs are going to be address in a patch that's supposed to arrive anytime between tonight to a few days from now, but the heart of the game is truly designed for the huge multiplayer environments.

Closing Comments
You can tell pretty quickly that Joint Ops was meant to be Novalogic's answer to Battlefield, and the huge amount of people that can play on one map is indeed a big draw. But the underwhelming vehicle lineup and the overly forgiving ballistics make gameplay frustrating a little too often. I found myself becoming a sniper just to hunt down spawn campers and enemy snipers, and I generally avoided riding in a vehicle over driving one. And even then, I never went for long distances. It would be great to have a five-second-or-so immunity on spawn, so that you can't get clipped the instant you appear by some dude hiding in a bush a couple hundred yards away, and it would be awesome to climb into a tank, jet or bomber plane and lay down some holy terror, instead of wheeling around like a bus driver or hunkering down in the APC with your sphincter clenched, hoping you're not spotted by someone lugging around a rocket launcher. Joint Ops offers some fun, stable, good-looking gameplay, but it won't dethrone Battlefield without some vehicular oomph and limitations on long-range fire.

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